JOHN DEWEY
Discipline of mind is in truth a result rather than a cause. Any mind is disciplined in a subject in which independent intellectual initiative and control have been achieved. Discipline represents original native endowment turned through gradual exercise into effective power. . . . Discipline is positive and constructive. Discipline, however, is frequently regarded as something negative as a painfully disagreeable forcing of mind away from channels congenial to it into channels of constraint, a process grievous at the time, but necessary as preparation for a more or less remote future. Discipline is then generally identified with drill; and drill is conceived after the mechanical analogy of driving, by unremitting blows, a foreign substance into a resistant material; or is imaged after the analogy of the mechanical routine by which raw recruits are trained to a soldierly bearing and habits that are naturally wholly foreign to their possessors. Training of this latter sort, whether it be called discipline or not, is not mental discipline. Its aim and result are not habits of thinking but uniform external habits of action. By failing to ask what he means by discipline, many a teacher is misled into supposing that he is developing mental force and efficiency by methods which in fact restrict and deaden intellectual activity, and which tend to create mechanical routine, or mental passivity and servility.—"How We Think", p. 63.
But even more revolutionary than Dewey's rejection of the strict discipline then prevailing in the schools was his introduction of industrial training as an integral part of education, not merely for the
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